Saving Mary Jane

Deep into the night on Indonesia's "Execution Island", nine condemned drug traffickers await a firing squad's volley of bullets. Across the water, families and supporters gather in despair.

But when word finally arrives, one family erupts in joy. A single life has been spared - Filipina maid Mary Jane Veloso has won a temporary stay of execution.

Mary Jane Veloso's reprieve came after a huge upwelling of public support back home in the Philippines. But, as Foreign Correspondent reveals, a key role was also played by a small team of human rights lawyers in the Philippines and Australia.

"We connected across the ocean if you like. I've never even met her but there I am sitting in my office and I've got the piece of law that can save her." - Felicity Gerry, Darwin barrister

Reporter Zoe Daniel tells how the legal team is fronting up to its next challenge: getting Mary Jane off death row and back home to her family. If successful, their argument just might save not only Mary Jane but also other drug mules facing execution.

Mary Jane's lawyers say she was not trafficking drugs when she was caught with 2.6 kilos of heroin. They say she was in fact a trafficked person - poor, vulnerable and deceived - and should be set free.

"She was not selling, she was not buying, she was not using." - Filipino lawyer Edre Olalia

Now her fate is intertwined with that of the woman she accuses of duping her into carrying drugs, her former neighbour Kristina Sergio. If Kristina Sergio is convicted of illegally recruiting her, Mary Jane Veloso's chances of winning her freedom grow.

But in the court - and in the street when she talks to Zoe Daniel - Kristina protests her innocence. Meanwhile Mary Jane Veloso waits on death row.

"If you shoot her, you might as well shoot every exploited person." - Darwin barrister

Transcript

DANIEL: April 29, 2015, nine convicted drug traffickers await the firing squad in Indonesia. Across from the place known as Execution Island, family and supporters gather in despair.

MOTHER: "I won't see him again and they're going to take him at midnight and shoot him!"

DANIEL: The prisoners have farewelled their loved ones. All that's left is grief.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "You go to bed thinking there's nothing more I can do. I've never had a client shot so it's a very difficult experience".

DANIEL: But in the final moments, one is spared - Mary Jane Veloso - a Filipina housemaid.

EDRE OLALIA: "Until the last moment of her breath is taken away, never give up".

DANIEL: This is the story behind the story - how was Mary Jane saved and will she make it home?

Manila is breathtakingly poor. Every single day more than 20,000 people come to the Philippines' capital desperate for work. Manila was originally expected to accommodate around 800,000 people but now with up to 25 million in the city and surrounds, there's just not enough space, not enough jobs, not enough of anything really and that's why people are on the move around the country and around the world to find work to feed their families.

One in ten end up leaving here for jobs overseas. Their families, and the government, depend on the money they send home - last year it was 28 billion dollars. There's a thriving legitimate industry that sources the jobs and organises travel. There's also a dark side to this mass movement of people. The poor are vulnerable. Mary Jane Veloso says she was tricked. Despite being a convicted drug trafficker, she's become an unlikely heroine in the Philippines because many can identify with her story.

EDRE OLALIA: "She's a single mother okay with two little boys six and twelve okay. And then she was forced to get out of my country as in the case of millions of other Filipinos more or less five to six thousand every day flying out of my country to look for opportunities just to put food on the table or to realise the basic dream of living a decent life of a human being".

DANIEL: Mary Jane owes her life partly to this man, human rights lawyer Edre Olalia and his team. They only took up the case a month before she was scheduled to die, after she was neglected by her own government.

EDRE OLALIA: [Human rights lawyer] "I mean it's another wakeup call so to speak for our government to really sincerely consistently take care of their own. After all, they contribute a lot to our economy".

DANIEL: From a poor family, Mary Jane Veloso says she was offered work as a domestic servant in Malaysia by a family friend, but when she got there, there was no job and she was given a ticket to find work in Indonesia instead. She says the friend bought her new clothes and gave her a new suitcase to put them in. When she arrived in Indonesia, 2.6 kilograms of heroin was found in the bag.

After being arrested, it was three months before she got a visit from a consular official and just a few months after that, she was found guilty of drug smuggling and sentenced to death.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "I'd been looking at four or five cases, not on the papers, just the general information of four or five cases largely women on death row who had issues of coercion, manipulation, deception - falls within the definition of human trafficking and she was one of the examples I was using, without ever being connected to her case".

DANIEL: Felicity Gerry QC is a British lawyer currently based in Darwin where she specialises in transnational crimes involving violence and exploitation of women. She got involved at the last minute, after reading a chain email.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "And the email said help Mary Jane, sign the petition, can you do something? And I just thought well if I don't do something now, I don't know if they've got the information that I've got. I don't know if I'm sitting here in this office with the information about Indonesian human trafficking law and I don't know if they've got that. They may have, they may not. So I replied and I said I think I can help you".

DANIEL: It set off a remarkable international collaboration. Felicity Gerry, human rights lawyer Edre Olalia and Philippine workers' rights group, Migrante International, began communicating online just one week before the scheduled executions. Felicity had some crucial advice for the team in the Philippines.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "This is all about protecting women particularly. The major statistics are that it's women and girls that are exploited in organised crime".

DANIEL: At the heart of the team's defence, the argument that Mary Jane was trafficked and under international treaties that both Indonesia and the Philippines have signed, she should never have been prosecuted in the first place.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "So the single way to explain the law in Mary Jane's case is that you have a UN protocol that defines what a human traffic victim is. So it's not just somebody who's forced to do something. It can be someone who's forced, coerced, deceived, manipulated and a situation of abuse of trust or importantly an abuse of vulnerability and here we have extreme poverty, extreme vulnerability with somebody with no other choices".

DANIEL: The story of how Mary Jane came to be locked up in an Indonesian gaol begins in her home province of Northern Luzon. There are few jobs here and wages are low. So it's a rich source of migrant workers. Mary Jane and her sisters all left to look for work overseas. The extended family still lives in this simple compound. Among them, sister Maritess and Mary Jane's two young sons - Mark Darren aged 6 and Mark Danielle, 12. They were all in Indonesia at the moment Mary Jane was due to be executed having just said their last goodbyes.

MARITESS: "When we heard that Mary Jane is safe we were all jump... clap our hands we are smiling hugging each other kissing each other because it's, oh my God it's a miracle, thank you Lord, thank you God. Thank you for saving the life of Mary Jane".

DANIEL: "How did the boys respond when they heard that their mother was alive?"

MARITESS: "Mark Daniel is jumping in the bed. He bump her [sic] head in the... [laughs] in the roof, because he's jumping and jumping like that".

DANIEL: In this deeply Catholic country, Mary Jane's mother Celia sees her daughter's last minute reprieve as a sign from heaven.

CELIA: "God saved my child. I came to my senses and only then realised how close my child had been to execution. I was ecstatic. I can't explain the feeling. I felt I was floating. I was over the moon".

DANIEL: But it's just a temporary relief. Mrs Veloso knows her daughter remains at risk - the execution has been postponed, not cancelled. Now the family is looking for more help from above to bring Mary Jane home. But the answer to their prayers may lie much closer - in a village just a short drive away. This is the home of the woman who has been accused of illegally recruiting Mary Jane and entrapping her - her god sister and former family friend, Kristina Sergio.

It was here that MJ once lived and this house is less than 50 m from the home of the woman that she accuses of double crossing her. Life in this village has changed since those allegations were made.

In a dramatic twist to the story, Kristina Sergio and her partner, Julius Lacanilao presented themselves to police on April 28 - the day before Mary Jane was due to face the firing squad - saying Mary Jane was innocent.

Kristina is the woman whom Mary Jane says betrayed her in Malaysia, promising her a job and then helping her shop for clothes. Kristina and Julius deny the charges of illegal recruitment and human trafficking and say they went to the police because they were receiving death threats and frightened for their lives.

The village is divided and feelings are running so high that Mary Jane's family is now under police protection. These women told us that Kristina Sergio also tried to recruit them, but then pretended she didn't know them when they came forward.

LORNA MITCH VALINO: "She claimed that she was not a recruiter - that she was not sending out people - that she was instead a real estate agent. That is why we came out - to prove that she was recruiting. Because she declared on TV that she was not a recruiter. Then, she accepted that she was a recruiter - so she was caught lying. That was why we said she was telling lies. Why not just accept that she did it? The victim is suffering for something she's not guilty of. While she is here enjoying a good life".

EDRE OLALIA: "The evidence so far available has pointed to the fact, the indisputable fact, that she has sent a lot of Filipinos... Filipinas, especially in her own province Nueva Ecija, in different places and the modus operandi or the pattern is that she accompanies these persons to a second country before she sends it to a third country. It's not straight away. It's not Philippines/Indonesia. You go to a second country first before you go to Indonesia. So there's a pattern, all right? And then she's not licensed. So the records will show that she has no authority or licence to recruit people for a fee especially".

DANIEL: Lawyer, Felicity Gerry, has come from Darwin to meet the rest of the legal team face to face for the first time. Mary Jane's stay of execution is only temporary - it's now about getting her out of prison and home to the Philippines.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "I feel like I know them, yeah absolutely. Really well, actually. It's a pleasure if you like to meet lawyers on the other side of the world who are dealing with the same issues that I've been researching and involved with so an absolute pleasure to have the most amazing case in the world that is capable of changing so many people's lives".

DANIEL: For any first time visitor, Manila is an eye opener. For Felicity, the poverty helps explain the plight of Mary Jane and others like her.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "So that's the mission today we're going to talk about how do we bring Mary Jane home. The bigger picture is how do you protect exploited people, particularly the exploited people of the Philippines? That's the much bigger picture and the much bigger job. So this is a massive, massive opportunity for governments and lawyers in every single country to say, what are we doing about human trafficking?"

DANIEL: Backed by a huge public campaign, these lawyers managed to pull off a remarkable coup, helping to persuade Indonesia not to kill Mary Jane Veloso. They say that as a victim of trafficking, she should never have been sentenced to die, despite Indonesia's mandatory drug laws.

"Would not every drug trafficker say I'm a trafficked person and that is my defence?"

EDRE OLALIA: "Yes of course but it's a matter of proof, it's a matter of credibility as well. It's a question of evidence and it's a question also of consistency whether they can be verified, validated and double checked and we did that. And it is our moral conviction that our client is absolutely innocent. But even then, the point is she's still trafficked. She's a trafficked person and then the only thing that could be possibly proven is that she was in possession. But she was not selling, she was not buying, she was not using and since the only arguable evidence that you can present is possession, the corresponding penalty is not death. It should be life imprisonment or even lower".

DANIEL: The lawyers contend that Mary Jane was lied to and in a position of deep vulnerability, in a foreign country where she knew no one other than the woman who took her there on the promise of a job that never existed.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "Largely you've got people from source countries like the Philippines and Indonesia being used in transnational organised crime as drug mules to cross borders so that other people can make money, making profit on the back of people like Mary Jane. The primary legal issue in a sense is that this is an exploited person, exploited by her circumstances in many ways. Add to that corruption and unfair trial procedures and the right and proper thing to do is to send her home to her kids".

DANIEL: The plight of Mary Jane Veloso has struck a chord in the Philippines. The story of the wronged maid on death row, true or not, has come to represent the plight of all poor Filipinos forced to work abroad, separated from their families for years and often abused. It's put huge pressure on the government to do more to help Mary Jane, including trying to obtain a presidential pardon from Indonesia. The driving force behind the campaign is workers' rights group Migrante International, which has worked tirelessly to raise Mary Jane's profile. Here, from their modest Manila headquarters, they represent all Filipinos working abroad. Mistreated works like Loel come here for help.

LOEL: "It's very sad for me because I want to be something some day. I want to be somebody some day but in debt to nobody".

DANIEL: "Why do you say that?"

LOEL: "Because my dream... [upset] didn't come true".

DANIEL: In her haste to improve her life, she was conned into paying a recruiter for a job that simply didn't exist. Now she owes thousands to money lenders. Women like Loel who've been tricked and cheated don't see Mary Jane Veloso as a criminal - they see her as one of them.

LOEL: "Mary Jane comes from a very poor family and so I was, and then I am the breadwinner of my family and she was, so we are related only the difference is she was convicted to death and I am here, but I lost thousands of pesos already. I lost the future of my children so that's the difference. But I am very well related to the case of Mary Jane Veloso".

DANIEL: Mary Jane's story has become a rallying point for migrant workers across the Philippines. The rich and powerful are also joining in, former world boxing champion Manny Pacquiao appealing to the Indonesian President directly.

DANIEL: The struggle to free Mary Jane now rests on court proceedings against the woman accused of manipulating her.

EDRE OLALIA: [in court] "We've been confident, not in a boastful way, confident in the way that the facts and the law are on our side and the proof's on our side".

DANIEL: Today, Kristina's lawyers are making a submission to the judge. In it, Kristina Sergio doesn't admit guilt but crucially, she declares Mary Jane is innocent.

[chasing after Kristina in car park] "Are you admitting your guilt in the affidavit"

KRISTINA SERGIO: "No, I'm not guilty".

DANIEL: "So just tell me what's in your affidavit, what do you say in your affidavit? What's your main point?"

KRISTINA SERGIO: "To set us all free".

DANIEL: "Have you trafficked people, are you a human trafficker?"

KRISTINA SERGIO: "No".

DANIEL: "Did you traffic drugs?"

KRISTINA SERGIO: "No, never in my life!"

DANIEL: "Are you an illegal recruiter?"

KRISTINA SERGIO: "No. That's it".

DANIEL: She claims that African drug traffickers placed the drugs in Mary Jane's bag without her knowledge. But she says she didn't know either.

HOWARD AREZA: [Kristina Sergio's lawyer] "Yeah she's definitely denying that, and in fact she stated in the sworn statement that Mary Jane is in fact innocent she was duped by these two men".

DANIEL: "So she's saying Mary Jane is innocent because she was manipulated by these men but she did not do it?"

HOWARD AREZA: "She did not do it, totally".

DANIEL: What happens next is now up to the judicial systems of two countries. First, Mary Jane's lawyers here in the Philippines need to prove that she was illegally recruited and that she should be brought back to testify in court. Ultimately, the team is hoping for a Presidential pardon from Indonesia.

EDRE OLALIA: "I can't free Mary Jane myself. We can free Mary Jane. Everybody who has a heart, you know, for people who are victims, the poor, the voiceless, the shirtless. Everybody who has a heart for people who are abandoned by their own government".

DANIEL: A poetry reading in Manila with friends and supporters is a rare chance for Mary Jane's parents to relax and celebrate the fact their daughter is still alive.

POETRY READING: ...What you are doing is nonsense! I am the victim! I am the victim here...

DANIEL: "What would it be like to see Mary Jane walk to the door into your home?"

MOTHER: "I would be so delighted!"

FATHER: "I would be so happy. I'd be so thrilled! We've prayed to God that she will be home soon. We will celebrate when our child gets home".

DANIEL: For Felicity Gerry, a chance email she chose not to delete has led not just to possibly helping to save this one life, but she hopes, many more.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "I feel as though, look I'm a mum, she's a mum and we connected across the ocean if you like. I've never even met her, but there I am sitting in my office being a mum and I've got the piece of law that can save her and I'm just so glad that I answered that email. Yeah it's, it's really, really emotional".

DANIEL: If Mary Jane's death sentence is commuted, she hopes a similar defence could be used in other drug mule cases and the women encouraged to give evidence against their exploiters.

FELICITY GERRY QC: "How are you going to empower people like Mary Jane Veloso to make legitimate choices not to be manipulated or deceived? Because if you shoot her, you might as well shoot every exploited person. You know this is a huge job to fix. There are millions of people here who are starving, desperate, sick, with no choices like we have. It's such a hard concept to understand, you know that we are so privileged that we get to make a choice".